How to Use Instagram Hashtags Effectively: Finding the Best Hashtags for your Instagram Account

Research shows that you should use Hashtags on all your posts.

As a feature that began on Twitter the hashtag has spread to almost all social media platforms and has become the main way for users to search for their interests. Acceptance of the hashtag is definitely a reason to use them in every post. No one will judge you for adding hashtags to your posts and if they do, who cares? By typing your hashtag onto a post it immediately expands your reach of your post beyond just your followers. You potentially can reach anyone interested in that hashtag keyword. How you use the hashtag is a more important thing to research.

How to use Hashtags on Instagram

Instagram has become a place where anyone can express themselves and everyone wants to get heard. Most people do not know how to capitalize on using hashtags to get more people viewing their content. According to TrackMaven posts with 11+ hashtags do better than posts with less. Don’t be shy when posting your next photo! When using your hashtags make sure to use the right Hashtags that are relevant to your topic to get the most result.

Steps to finding the right hashtags for your post

There are 3 simple steps that we take here at Edstagram to find the best hashtags for your posts:

Learn from your competitors

Find a group of competitors from your niche. These are accounts that you admire and aspire to become. Fine their most commonly used hashtags and see the RELEVANT ones to your list of hashtags.

Find related hashtags

With a small list of hashtag ideas that are related to your post do some research and find hashtags that are similar to your ideas. For example if your hashtag was #dog you could add #pug and #shiba as similar hashtags.

Identify popular hashtags: avoid over populating hashtags

While using popular hashtags would be good to get views there are also thousands of other people posting to the same hashtags so you will get drowned out in a sea of posts. A lot of Instagrammers have an issue here because they use the most popular hashtags for each of their posts and wonder why nobody likes or comments. Our suggestion is to use less popular hashtags that you are confident that you can rank your post in. The Instagram algorithm ranks posts by the amount of engagement it gets in the first hour. By using hashtags of varying popularity it can have a viral effect if your post gets ranked as a top post for small hashtags because it could boost it enough to get ranked in a larger hashtag.

Tools you can use to find and manage your Hashtags

Now that you’ve realized the importance of using hashtags on all your posts we can finally provide you with the tools you need to successfully use hashtags to their full potential.